A serious problem associated with installing concrete in cold climates is deterioration caused by freezing and thawing, commonly referred to as frost damage. Several theories have been developed to explain frost damage but it is recognized that such damage only happens to moist concrete. Damage occurs when water inside concrete freezes, causing swelling and micro-cracking. Repeated cycles of freezing and thawing cause the initial cracks to grow and coalesce into larger cracks that eventually manifest themselves on the surface.
The current method of testing the resistance of concrete to frost damage is to subject concrete specimens to repeated cycles of freezing and thawing inside a cabinet specially designed for that purpose. Typically, the test specimens are cycled between 40° F. and 0° F. and back again in not less than two or more than five hours. The testing continues until the specimens have been subjected to 300 cycles or until they have failed (ASTM C 666). This is both time consuming and expensive.
When a concrete specimen is cooled much below 0° C., certain transformations occur. The specimen shrinks initially, but at temperatures below 0° C., it expands suddenly. Further cooling causes it to shrink again until cooled to a very low temperature where it expands once more. In general, as a specimen cools it will gradually stiffen causing it to vibrate at successively higher frequencies. At the onset of freezing when a specimen expands suddenly, it vibrates at a higher frequency than before it expanded. This may be due to ice forming in the pores, the concrete stiffening and manifesting this as a higher fundamental frequency of vibration.
Concrete, when frozen, is considered to be frost susceptible if it dilates and to be resistant to frost action if it does not dilate. Thus, a device that measures the change in length of concrete specimens as they are cooled would enable the relative freeze-thaw durability of concrete to be determined. This may be possible within as little as a single freeze-thaw cycle. If dilation occurs, the deterioration process has begun and the concrete will fail with additional freezing and thawing cycles. Further, initial dilation may not be visible as cracks, although the larger the initial dilation, the more frost susceptible is the concrete. However, it is possible that a specimen that dilates during a single freeze-thaw cycle can return to its original length. If this happens, one may conclude that no frost damage has occurred and that the specimen is durable. Thus, a device designed to monitor length changes throughout a freeze-thaw cycle would be beneficial in determining the susceptibility of various forms of concrete to frost damage. Further, a device that measures the fundamental frequency of vibration of the “excited” specimen subjected to a cooling regimen as above provides another non-destructive means for detecting and correlating these cooling-warming cycles.